There’s an excellent New York magazine article out this morning that gets the story of what the Columbia trustees have been doing to the university right, with the brutal title How Trump Defeated Columbia: The inside story of an unconditional surrender. Unfortunately the article doesn’t have any information about what is going on now. I’m guessing the author has good sources informed about what the board was doing through the cave-in and the Armstrong resignation, not so good about what has happened since then.
Here’s the description of how the cave-in happened:
But the idea of a defiant legal response was a fantasy. Columbia’s board was already on the same wavelength as the Trump administration. On several of the task force’s demands — including banning masks, restricting protests, stripping disciplinary powers from the senate, and allowing campus police to arrest demonstrators — the group was ready to concede immediately. On March 21, it sent a letter to the government essentially surrendering. Perhaps reflecting an understanding that the letter would not go over well with the Columbia community, nobody signed it…
Faculty who interacted with Armstrong in this period say she was genuinely shocked that the world believed Columbia had caved. It made a certain sense, from the point of view of someone simply trying to survive minute by minute in a crisis: There had been a gun pointed at Columbia’s head, and to get it lowered, all she had to do was agree to some things her trustees already wanted…
Members of the board of trustees give different accounts of who broke up with whom. Some maintain that Armstrong was forced out; others say there was mutual agreement she could not remain. Either way, she was gone.
Here’s the description of the group of trustees who are driving this and their weak opposition:
Several people with knowledge of the board’s evolution described a dynamic in which a subset of members was convinced that Columbia had a dangerous concentration of antisemites and that strong action was needed to bring the campus back to order. That circle’s most prominent member is Victor Mendelson, part of a four-generation Columbia lineage, whose father was also a trustee. The billionaire Mendelsons run HEICO, a Florida-based aerospace company and defense contractor. There’s also Shoshana Shendelman, whose child is a current student, and to a quieter degree Greenwald, a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who spent his career at Fried Frank and Goldman Sachs. A more moderate set includes Mark Gallogly, who co-founded the investment firm Centerbridge Partners and who has given millions to Democratic candidates for office; Kathy Surace-Smith, a lawyer and partial owner of the Seattle Mariners whose husband is the president of Microsoft; Abigail Black Elbaum, who runs a real-estate management firm; and Jonathan Rosand, a professor of neurology at Harvard. Two others were more clearly identified with the liberal-coded position that antisemitism was a concern but one that was being used disingenuously to stifle speech: Wanda Marie Holland Greene, who runs a progressive school for girls in San Francisco, and Li Lu, a leader of the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square who became a billionaire investor…
Greene and Li quietly rotated off the board last summer, further tilting the balance. “The board lost two of its strong oppositional voices when they left,” a person who interacts with the group said.
Mendelson is a donor to Elise Stefanik and admits to being in direct communication with the Trump White House:
Mendelson recently visited an undergraduate seminar and told the students that as one of the panel’s few registered Republicans, “I’m the one the White House calls to yell at.”
Discussions amongst the board have been immediately leaked to the Trump administration and published by the Trump mouthpieces at the WSJ:
In a minuted meeting, with colleagues who were whispering to right-wing publications and Republicans in Washington, it was difficult for trustees to take the position that antisemitism was a small or medium-size problem — even if they honestly saw it that way…
During one session, the trustees had a preliminary discussion about granting arrest power to campus security officers. Within hours, it was in The Wall Street Journal — a leak that some interpreted as an effort to lock in that outcome.
It seems to me that it if the board had investigated this it would not have been hard to find out who was responsible. I don’t see how the board can allow people doing this kind of thing to remain in place. Why have they not taken action?
Mendelson clearly continues to have a great deal of influence on the board. He’s both a Vice-Chair and a member of the presidential search committee. That he’s taking calls from the White House to discuss what the board is doing seems to be grounds for his immediate removal from the board.
Also likely influential behind the scenes is board chair emeritus Jonathan Lavine, who is co-chair of the Presidential search committee. In text messages to board co-chair David Greenwald (see here), he referred to “the antisemites on the Senate” and dismissed pro-Palestinian protests as “supporting rape and terrorism”.
I hope this article has an impact with the rest of the current board, making it clear to them the disastrous direction in which they have taken the university, and encouraging them to change course, beginning with removing Victor Mendelson.
There’s a statement being signed by members of the Columbia faculty refusing to attend commencement in protest of the actions of the acting president and board of trustees.
Given that it has become clear that what is behind this Columbia story is what has happened and what is happening in Gaza, I’ll regularly include here some links relevant to the ongoing story of that genocidal campaign. Please do not submit comments arguing about this, I won’t moderate a discussion of whether slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent people is a good thing or not.
Genocide through denial of food and health care.
Ethnic cleansing through the razing of all structures in parts of Gaza.
From Haaretz, ‘People Are Eating Weeds’: Israel’s New Gaza Offensive Intensifies Humanitarian Disaster:
The renewed Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip that began on Friday night has already resulted in hundreds of deaths, thousands of injuries, tens of thousands of new refugees, a worsening risk of hunger, spreading disease and the closure of the enclave’s biggest hospitals.
According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, on Sunday alone, at least 125 Palestinians were killed, bringing the total since the start of the assault on Thursday to about 375…
Palestinian sources say one of the deadliest of the attacks, which have included aerial and artillery strikes, led to a fire in a displaced persons encampment in Mawasi. Footage from the scene showed a fire that had consumed the tents.
Residents, including children, were seen with severe burns while families searched for their loved ones amid the flames. In Deir al-Balah, five children were killed by a missile or shell that hit a street.
The attack on Mawasi was near a field hospital operated with the help of the Kuwaiti government. Following the attack, the hospital announced it was shutting down its surgical department due to damage to the hospital’s generators.
There were also massive attacks in the northern Gaza Strip, in the Jabalya area, where dozens of deaths were reported.
Other footage showed bodies lying on the floor of the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza. The Palestinian Health Ministry announced that the hospital was closing. Footage showed patients being led out on beds and in wheelchairs.
The hospital is the second major facility in Gaza to close its doors in recent days after the European Hospital in southern Gaza shut down over the weekend in the face of attacks in the surrounding area, as the Israel Defense Forces sought to kill Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar.
In addition, the Palestinian Civil Defense Organization announced that it had been forced to put out of commission 75 percent of its ambulances due to a lack of gasoline and that within three days, it would have no choice but to do the same to the remainder.
A coalition of humanitarian organizations estimates that more than 63,000 people have been forced to leave their homes in the past three days and that more than 500,000 have done so since Israel renewed the war in Gaza two months ago.
Update: The New York Times has a long article about “Project Esther.” This is a Heritage Foundation-sponsored effort to tar anyone protesting what Israel is doing in Gaza as a pro-Hamas terrorist (along the lines of what I’ve seen here from Scott Aaronson). They have campaigned for exactly the tactics being used by the Trump administration against Columbia and other universities.
The NYT describes the origin of Project Esther after the Hamas attack on Israel as follows:
Soon after, four well-connected, conservative supporters of Israel met virtually to address these events.
Only one was Jewish: Ellie Cohanim, Mr. Trump’s former antisemitism envoy. She said she was grateful when the three men reached out to her and affectionately called them her “Christian friends.” Two were leaders of Christian Zionist groups: Luke Moon, executive director of the Philos Project, and Mario Bramnick, the president of the Latino Coalition for Israel and an evangelical adviser to Mr. Trump. The fourth was James Carafano, senior counselor to the president at the Heritage Foundation.
Some evangelical Christians have increasingly aligned themselves with conservative political forces in Israel, supporting their claims of biblical dominion over contested Palestinian territories. Many feel a kinship with Israel because of shared religious heritage. But some also believe that supporting Israel will hasten biblical end times, or advance Christianity’s global influence.
A large group of American Jewish leaders has recently issued a statement warning about this campaign.
Update: Some good news from Columbia.
Only half way through the New York Magazine article (it is long!)-but so far it is very good. Summers really knows the place and everything I read so far has been spot on.
I’m quite impressed you’ve stuck with this and haven’t folded from all the intimidation. This is something we need more of amongst academics. Respect.
Greg Guyson,
Thanks. Scott and the Israeli government have been making the situation Columbia is caught up in a lot easier to understand, and thus easier to see what’s the right thing to do. Scott by making it clear that the whole bogus “antisemitism”/Trump attack on Columbia has always been all about a desperate attempt to support the military action in Gaza by painting anyone who criticizes it as an antisemite and a terrorist. Unfortunately the Israeli government has also now clarified things, with a lot more innocent people dying and the genocidal intent of the war becoming more explicit every day.
There were two open letters by mathematics community. One is pro-Israel, another os pro-Palestinian. Have you heard of them, Peter?
I don’t agree that Israel’s war in Gaza is genocidal, but I certainly think it is done all wrong and will harm Israel and quite possibly fail to defeat Hamas and other enemies of Israel.
That said, I read all your posts and the comments on them as well because they are the best information I can find on what is happening with Columbia.
I really appreciate these posts.
RandomizedPTU,
I just heard earlier today about this one
https://aurdip.org/en/mathematics-and-moral-responsibility-the-imo-and-the-genocide-in-gaza/
don’t know about the other one. If you want to post a link that’s fine, but I don’t want to host a discussion of this, since there’s no connection to Columbia and boycotting Israel or Israelis raises a very different set of issues (I’m in most cases on the boycotts don’t work/a bad idea side of such issues, but there are extreme cases).
Michael Gogins,
I should clarify that by “genocidal intent” I’m meaning a policy of “kill enough people and destroy enough of their homes that the rest will leave.” Another word for this would be “ethnic cleansing.”
If you’re not reading the latest news out of Israel and Gaza, you might want to take a look. Netanyahu and Smotrich are getting more and more explicit about starving the people of Gaza to kill them and make them leave, that the only thing constraining them is Western governments and public opinion. The plan seems to be to implement a starvation policy while letting a few trucks through and claiming to be providing aid.
Peter, I feel that you are not arguing in good faith. Clearly you have a strong point of view about the war, but you had not disclosed it for a long time. Secondly, when the discussion exposed the weakness of your arguments you shut it down. Finally, you present your view point about the war, but refuses to let the other side present theirs.
I would also want to say that your behaviour and arguments pushed me more towards the American government attitude and I find myself horrified by this. However, you convinced me more that many people in Columbia hold pro-Palestinians point of view (which is legitimate), but that they let this point of view influence the way they treat the protests.
Finally, if you quote Haaretz, you might like to mention that it is a Zionist newspaper. I haven’t seen Palestinian news outlet reporting on the 7th of October critically. Moreover, you are somewhat misleading your readers, Haaretz and many Israelis object to the current actions of the Israeli government, however, the the protests in universities were not about the current actions, but started even before Israeli forces got into Gaza.
Just wanted to compliment you on your integrity. Total respect. Keep up the good work.
Yiftach,
My views have changed over the last few weeks. I think I made it explicit in my early postings that I saw legitimate reasons for strong feelings on both sides of the Gaza issue, and I felt it was important to not engage with those and stick to dealing with the Fascist dictatorship coming after my university.
Over the past few weeks two things have changed. Arguing with Scott made it very clear to me that the legitimacy of protesting Israeli behavior in Gaza was what this has all been about, it’s what has been driving people like him to attack my university and to collaborate with Fascism.
The second change is in the reports I read of the facts on the ground and the stated intent of the Israeli government. Gaza is being razed to the ground, its civilians murdered and starved to death.
Sorry, but at this point I no longer see two sides to this issue, and I have no interest in arguing about what happened back when there were two sides. I’m not going to now engage in or host arguments about things like Scott’s belief that the combatant/non-combatant death ratio looks good. This has nothing to do with Zionism (I’m on-board with Scott’s liberal Zionism), it has to do with murder.
I’ve never needed to hide or obfuscate my views in the slightest. That’s because I simply start with the liberal, decent, humane end goal — Palestinians living in peace in their own state in Gaza and the West Bank, while Israelis live in peace in Israel — and then work backwards to whatever would be needed to achieve that goal. And I observe that one thing that’s obviously necessary, whether or not it’s sufficient, is the total military defeat and surrender of Hamas (and its genocidal backers in Iran and elsewhere), in exactly the same way that the total defeat and surrender of the Axis powers was a necessary condition for any decent outcome in 1945.
Unlike the Hamas side, which seeks to maximize Israeli civilian deaths (and is indifferent to Gazan civilian deaths), I seek a way of achieving this goal that minimizes Gazan civilian deaths.
You might notice that no one in the tentifada movement has ever said, “well, of course Israel should destroy Hamas, for the Gazans’ sake as much as their own, but here’s how they could do that while killing fewer civilians.” That’s because that’s never been their interest. Their sole interest, even when the bodies were still strewn across the ground on Oct. 7, even before Israel had started fighting back, was in Israel not existing. Some of them are thankfully crystal-clear about this, while others raise deflection and obfuscation to a high art—but I’m not aware of a single example of a tentifada spokesperson, not one, who’s ever explicitly affirmed that Israel should get to keep existing, that Jews should get to defend themselves as Jews from annihilation, or that those “settler colonists” unable to flee shouldn’t be massacred in a thousand more October 7ths.
This is the whole core of the disagreement. It’s the question that needs to be settled, before we can proceed to the further question of how to get to the desired end state (where Israel and Palestine both exist and Hamas is no more) while minimizing Gazan civilian deaths.
I’m grateful to Peter for saying that he’s on board with liberal Zionism. If so, alas, that puts him directly at odds with the entire tentifada movement that he’s now defending. That Peter would suffer me and my family to live, even while he floridly denounces me daily, unfortunately doesn’t mean that his new allies would show me the same wonderful consideration and kindness. And when his allies shout from the rooftops that they wouldn’t let us live, what choice do I have but to believe them?
Scott,
Wake up from your lunatic obsession with what was in the minds of the tentifada students, and start paying attention to what Netanyahu, Smotrich, etc. are saying and what is happening in the real world.
Scott:
The Israeli government could have prevented a lot of civilian deaths if they hadn’t been trying so hard to prevent deaths in the IDF.
It has been an accepted maxim since the Vietnam war that you can’t win a war from the air. Israel clearly didn’t believe this in the 2006 Lebanon war, and it also seems they didn’t really believe this in the current Gaza war. And this is why there have been so many civilian deaths.
Now, after a year-and-a-half of bombing Gaza and causing countless unnecessary civilian deaths, it looks like they may finally be ready to send the Israeli Army into Gaza with enough force to actually win (and undoubtedly there will be quite a few casualties on the Israeli side), but there has been an immense amount of damage done already.
Peter Shor,
I don’t want to host a discussion of past IDF tactics, or a discussion of the history of how the situation in Gaza got to where it is today.
The obvious problem with sending troops into Gaza to “win” has always been what they will do once they “win”, and are surrounded by 2 million people whose homes they have destroyed and relatives they have slaughtered. Smotrich and others are clear about what the answer to this problem is: use murder and starvation to force them to leave.
Peter (Woit), the point is that you need to decide which conversation you want to have here! A discussion about the real world would certainly find me on your side against Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Until a few days ago, though, you were explicit that you wanted to have a discussion not about Gaza, but about Columbia. And the protesters at Columbia have never had the slightest interest in the details of the IDF’s strategy or tactics in Gaza, because they reject the whole legitimacy of Israel’s existence. And if every time I bring that up I’m answered only with abuse, I’ll treat that as an implicit acknowledgment that I’m correct about it.
Scott,
I’ve consistently refused to waste time on your insane paranoid fantasies about the Columbia protesters. I have been paying attention to what you and others have to say about Gaza and this has made it very clear to me that what the Israeli military is doing in Gaza is what this is all about. You psychologically cannot face the genocidal reality of what the side you identify with is doing, so have developed a crazy fantasy that Columbia students sitting in tents are the genocidal ones, that your side is the morally just one, no matter how many people they kill or starve to death.
You may take this as abuse, but I’m trying to do you a favor. If you don’t wake up soon, but support the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Gaza to its ugly and bitter end, you may some day find it difficult to live with that.
See, there you go again! “Insane paranoid fantasies.” You can’t just straightforwardly answer the question of whether it’s true or false that your allies in the tentifada movement cheer the death of my friends and family in Israel. You know that a “false” answer would be abundantly, extravagantly contradicted by the protesters’ own words, and yet a “true” answer would concede the case to me. So your only move is to try to insult, intimidate, and guilt-trip me out of asking the question at all. And yet, if it were your friends and family, you’d be asking the question as well.
Scott,
I would have thought it was obvious that by describing your convictions about the students as obsessive paranoid fantasies I do not think the students at Columbia were cheering the death of your friends and family in Israel. It’s your paranoid fantasy, not something true. But since it’s an obsession, I’m sure you can find a case where someone, somehow associated with these students somewhere, sometime said something that you can take as evidence that they did such cheering. And maybe you’re even right that such a person exists and did such a thing. But this is not about understanding the protestors, whose interest was not in the death of your friends and family, it’s about making you psychologically able to justify murder and ethnic cleansing.
I mean, do you or don’t you agree that CUAD is the umbrella group that organized the protests at Columbia, and that therefore has sole authority to explain to the world what the protests were about? Do you or don’t you agree that CUAD’s official position includes celebration of the October 7 attacks and of the ideals of Yahya Sinwar? Do you or don’t you agree that not one tentifada group, anywhere in the world, has acknowledged any right on Israel’s part to exist or to defend itself from annihilation? Either you can show me where I’m wrong on one or more of these specific points … or else you can concede that my fears about what the protesters would have done to my family are not delusional in the slightest, any more than the Jews of 1930s Europe were when they feared — entirely correctly — that a large fraction of their neighbors would rejoice to see them murdered.
As long as I don’t cheer the deaths of Gazan civilians — which I don’t, obviously — I’m doing morally better than the large portion of humanity, from all across the usual political spectrum, that cheered the Holocaust and then cheered again on the news of October 7, leaving an indelible trail of words that even the fury of a Peter Woit can never erase from history.
Scott,
“As long as I don’t cheer the deaths of Gazan civilians — which I don’t, obviously — I’m doing morally better than the large portion of humanity, from all across the usual political spectrum, that cheered the Holocaust and then cheered again on the news of October 7”
Looks like we both agree what this is all about: there’s an ongoing Israeli genocide campaign, but this is not a problem for you, since you’re convinced you’ve found CUAD documents show that you’re “doing morally better than [a] large portion of humanity”.
I’m certainly not going to take any lectures on morality from the large portion of humanity that cheered the Holocaust and October 7, or from the even larger portion of humanity — including yourself — that’s totally fine with those who cheered such atrocities, to the extent of dismissing all fears of their repetition as “bogus.” A commitment to “never again” is a prerequisite to any discussion of how the IDF might defeat the remnant of Hitlerism that thrives in Gaza in a way that would kill fewer innocents. So, I would discuss that question with a far-left Zionist, someone who credibly and without prompting showed their horror at the attempted Holocaust of October 7. But you, Peter, by choosing to show pure, unmitigated contempt for all fears of Jewish survival, have forfeited the right to have your opinions about IDF tactics in Gaza considered seriously.
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=14738&cpage=2#comment-251074
The ongoing back and forth between Peter and Scott is rather sad, because both parties seem blind to the other’s truth. For Scott, the fact that one does not acknowledge that a vocal cohort of protesters at Columbia find Israel illegitimate and at the very least justified October 7th as legitimate resistance, and do not think Israel should exist as a separate Jewish state-all of which is pretty much well-supported-is a red line. Fair enough. For Peter, the fact that Israel is moving closer and closer to an ethnic cleansing of Gaza and that this is not acknowledged is a red line. Both things can legitimately be different but valid red lines. The repeated arguing is bizarre because the red lines, while interconnected, are different, but the arguments being posted haven’t changed.
Peter, I was sure that would be a link to some comment where you expressed your horror over October 7, and thereby refuted my charge that you don’t give a shit. But no! It’s just a link to a comment that expresses contempt about those who fear yet more mass-murder of Jews, saying that such people must be evildoers displacing their guilt about Gaza. In other words, it’s a comment from a parallel universe where we don’t face the terrible dilemma that most of the population of Gaza (along with much of the rest of the planet) wants all Jews dead—a universe different from this one, a universe where I’d much rather be than here.
Peter, for months I’ve avoided calling you an antisemitic piece of shit, even as dozens of your comments seemed to point inescapably in that direction. But now it’s clear: you’ll gladly hang out with Jews, but only as long as they’re the kind willing to be silent as much of the world calls for millions of Jews to be exterminated … or to join the call themselves. And when offered chance after chance to condemn Trump, condemn Netanyahu, condemn the collateral killing of innocents in Gaza … just as long as you also validate the Jewish fear of the large portion of humanity eager to kill all Jews, just do that one thing … you burn the olive branch and hurl endless abuse at the person who offered it. What sort of person does that make you?
When I was a kid, I understood “never again” to mean that Jews would never allow any people to face genocide, if we could do anything to stop it. It made me proud of my heritage.
These days I understand that “never again”, especially when spoken by Zionists, means something very different. It’s more like, “we will massacre millions before we allow a single Jew to be threatened.” It sickens me. Scott, people like you kinda make me ashamed to be Jewish, because I don’t want to be associated with your views in any way. It’s sad, because I like your blog and respect your work, and I would really like to see you as a role model. And I could still see you as a role model, if you changed course on this topic.
Also, I don’t doubt that there are members of CUAD who want the destruction of Israel, and I agree that that goal is abhorrent and must be stopped. I also think it is a perfectly natural and human response to having your friends and family treated like vermin for decades. If you want to stop that extremism from spreading, you need to treat the cause, which is Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians. Or you could support Israel’s Final Solution and exterminate every last Palestinian, until there are none left to radicalize. Which do you choose?
Finally, some extremist members of CUAD may be TALKING about murder, but Israel is ACTUALLY MURDERING countless innocent civilians every day. That you seem to spend most of your energy protesting the former and legitimizing the latter is a problem.
Dave,
My involvement in all this started purely because of the Trump attempt to destroy Columbia. Scott appeared on the scene saying that this was justified because of what happened here during the student protests. I did my best to stick to the issue of illegal exercise of dictatorial power. Why were Scott and other seemingly sensible people fine with a dictator illegally trying to destroy Columbia? Why was our board of trustees caving in to a dictator? I literally could not in my mind come up with any explanation of why these things were happening.
Recently I’ve changed tack as it became clear to me that the answer to those questions lies in what has been happening in Gaza and the West Bank. This is an awful story going back decades, with Oct. 7 only one in a long list of disgraceful atrocities perpetrated by both sides. From everything I’ve seen in fifty years, arguing with people about these atrocities or about what the right abstract solution is to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict generates immense amounts of heat and zero light. So I’ve refused to do it and will continue to refuse to do it.
The students protesting at Columbia were not motivated by desire to kill Scott’s family and implement a second Holocaust. They were motivated by outrage at what Israel has been doing in Gaza and the West Bank, and they have very good reasons for that outrage. I have very mixed feelings about what this motivation led them to. There’s a good argument that disrupting the operation of the university was going to have little positive effect on what they were upset about, and an excellent argument that those who occupied Hamilton Hall destroyed whatever positive their protests had achieved.
While Scott’s accusations against the students are nuts, about the non-crazy complaints about their views, this is what I think. Given the Israeli government’s rejection of the two-state solution and its enforcement of that policy, I don’t understand the complaint against protestors who want the single state to not be a Jewish state. People have been explaining for decades now that if Israel is to continue to be a Jewish state the only choices are two states or an apartheid state. Since Israel has taken two states off the table, why blame anyone for pointing out that the remaining choices are apartheid state or non-Jewish state and saying they don’t want the apartheid option?
What I’ve heard from some of the protestors is calls for armed resistance to the military occupation. I think such armed resistance is a bad idea because in the current situation all it can possibly lead to is combatants getting pointlessly killed. Killing civilians is much worse, not only pointless but a terrible moral outrage. I’ve never heard a protestor calling for this.
The other recent change for me is the news from Gaza. I’m not going to apologize for confronting Scott with that and I think his reaction speaks for itself. Just saw his latest that now I’m “an antisemitic piece of shit”. This is exactly what the whole thing at Columbia is all about: there are a bunch of people out there like Scott whose reaction to Israel’s genocidal campaign is to accuse anyone who criticizes it of being an “antisemite”.
To get back to the topic of the blog posting. It looks like at least some of the Columbia trustees are in Scott’s camp, and that’s a significant part of the story of the cave-in to a Fascist dictator. What can we do to stop negotiations by the same people for a further cave-in? We know who the leader of this faction is, Victor Mendelson. If the Columbia community had anything to say about the trustees, I think he’d be gone. Given that we don’t, what can we do?
I was just about to post about about the moral repugnance of Scott’s position, but AJewishGuy put it better and more concisely than I ever could:
“Finally, some extremist members of CUAD may be TALKING about murder, but Israel is ACTUALLY MURDERING countless innocent civilians every day. That you seem to spend most of your energy protesting the former and legitimizing the latter is a problem.”
This x 100.
I would only add that this moral sickness stems in part from Scott’s illusions about “intent” (which Sam Harris also invokes to justify genocide).
In Scott’s mind, Israel doesn’t “intend” to kill children; they’re just collateral damage. Oopsies! But you see, Hamas and CUAD, they really really WANT to kill children and civilians. So they’re worse, even though the relevant metric—the ratio of Palestinian children killed to Israeli children killed since October 7—is over 350 to 1.
The numbers don’t matter. Reality doesn’t matter. People’s actions don’t matter. The only thing that matters is that Scott can magically read the minds of people he’s never met (indeed, people who don’t even exist) and know that they’re guilty of thought crimes—which, crucially, are somehow worse than real crimes.
“AJewishGuy,” you’re probably too far gone to be rescued: the enormity of what you don’t understand about the world is so breathtaking that it could be remedied only by living your life over from the beginning. Here goes, though:
Yes, after the Holocaust, after those who the Jews had lived among as neighbors for centuries turned on them in a gleeful orgy of killing, the survivors and their descendants for a thousand generations could’ve been forgiven for never trusting the rest of humanity ever again. And yet that’s not how they reacted at all. Instead they said: we’ll just build a democratic state on this tiny crumb of land we’ve been granted by a vote of the UN. And we’ll extend our hand in friendship to anyone who will suffer us to exist here. Even those, like Germany, who sent us to the gas chambers just a few years ago. To the Arabs, they offered peace and coexistence as well.
But most Arabs of the region had allied with the Nazis in WWII—and crucially, unlike the Germans, they never abandoned Nazi ideas after the war, but simply fused them with Islamic fundamentalism. They treated Grand Mufti al-Husseini, who’d spent the war in Germany trying to convince Hitler to bring the Final Solution to Palestine, as a returning hero when he came back. So, rather than accept the UN’s partition plan, and live peacefully in the 99.8% of the Middle East that they controlled and also as a minority with equal rights in Israel, they invaded the newborn Israel from every direction and tried to kill all the Jews. After they failed, they tried again in 1967. Then they tried again in 1973. Then, after it was obvious that they couldn’t defeat Israel in a conventional war, they said they wanted peace—and Israel offered them pretty much everything they asked for, consistent with its own continued existence—but at the last second, they walked away from the peace proposal and chose suicide terrorism instead. Then in 2023 they tried one more time to invade Israel and kill all the Jews.
Crucially, the attempted genocides started before there were any settlements or much of an Israeli right wing. The unrepentant Hitlerism of Israel’s neighbors is what caused the rise of the Israeli right wing.
Even today there are paths to peace, but they all go through changing culture and education to end the dream of eradicating Israel and killing all the Jews. Postwar Germany and Japan, and Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf states, demonstrate what’s possible.
Alas, useful idiots across the West, by keeping the dream of eradicating Israel alive, have prolonged the suffering of innocents on both sides. Like I said, it’s probably too late for you, but you could choose any day to join those of us pursuing the only possible path to peace: recognition by both sides of the other’s right to exist.
All,
I’m going to sleep. Please stop writing whatever outraged comment you’re writing and do something healthier, maybe sleep too, depending on your time zone. If you do want to keep writing, it better be on topic about what is now happening at Columbia.
Yes, it’s clear that what’s happening in Gaza is central to understanding what is happening at Columbia. That doesn’t mean that further discussion of Gaza will help us deal with the threats to Columbia, and my fear that such discussion brings out bad craziness has been amply vindicated.
I have three comments.
1. That’s an extremely (frankly, disgustingly) Israel-centric view of the history, but I’ll ignore it since it’s both irrelevant to the issue at hand, and I’ve never claimed to be an expert historian on this subject.
2. You consistently group all Arabs into a single unit. I refer to the state of Israel (more specifically, the military/government of Israel) as a unit because there is a coherent hierarchy of decision-making there. The same is not true of Palestinians or Arabs in general. “The Arabs” didn’t turn to suicide terrorism, some specific Arab terrorists did, and for that, you seem comfortable condemning ALL Palestinians to death. Arabs aren’t a single faceless blob hungering for murder, they’re just people.
3. Recognition by both sides of the other’s right to exist? Changing culture and education? How does that square with the genocide happening right now? How does that square with bombing schools and hospitals into dirt?
Yes, the history of this conflict is a bit more complicated than “evil Israel stole their land.” We know that. But the history isn’t as important as what’s happening RIGHT NOW. And no history can possibly justify genocide.
Bringing this back to Columbia and not a discussion directly about the Middle East, I disagree with this: “Scott by making it clear that the whole bogus “antisemitism”/Trump attack on Columbia has always been all about a desperate attempt to support the military action in Gaza by painting anyone who criticizes it as an antisemite and a terrorist.”
First of all, I don’t recall Scott saying he supports what Trump is doing. In fact, IIRC he had a long post about fighting against what Trump is doing. I do recall Scott being ambivalent about the student protester visa deportation issue (which to me is very problematic) and feeling that the protesters as a whole are deeply anti-Semitic (which I don’t agree with either), but this is different and is also different from explicit support of what is going on on the ground in Gaza. As that is a different story NOT relevant to Columbia, and as I am not a psychologist, this is the end of the “Scott” discussion for me.
I do however think that the notion that the trustees are aligned with Trump because they think what Israel is doing in Gaza is good is similar to saying the protesters are all anti-Semites. It may be true for some, but I doubt it globally. I do think a higher percentage of the trustees likely feel the protest movement as a whole is anti-Semitic than the faculty and students do, but I think this more has to do with something already quoted in the NY Magazine article that you link to: already by October 10th 2023 we had 1 pretty large pro-Palestinian protest (with the usual rhetoric) on the steps of Low (October 9th), a letter signed by prominent faculty justifying what happened on October 7th as legitimate resistance (which is nonsensical if they really knew international law and what happened on October 7th-which was already pretty clear), and a second protest where there was physical violence and charges filed (October 10th). This then snowballed over time into the mess of that year. There are at least 2 (probably more) things to unpack here: the issue of anti-Semitism, and the issue of disruption. A 3rd issue-that of Trump weaponizing these 2 issues, or Columbia “caving in to pressure”-isn’t relevant (yet) for these 2 issues because Trump was not elected until late 2024. I think the trustees then (and now) were not happy with the response by the university to what was going on and wanted it rectified for all sorts of obvious reasons-financial, image, and yes because many felt we had a festering issue with protesters whose goal was to disrupt, creating problems with the learning environment for students on campus. I think at least half of the “cave in” can be attributed to this alone. Other aspects of the cave in (MESAAS “receivership” and IHRA) may indeed by driven by Zionist feelings from trustees, faculty or a combination. I think it is most likely that several of the Trump demands would have been implemented without Trump, and these 2 would not have. The degree to which those who make decisions actively wanted these 2 changes or simply were ok with them but not otherwise driven to make them, we may never know.
The issue of “anti-Semitism” on Columbia campus is central to this. The question to me is by what standard do we mean. By the standard I adhere to (the late 20th century liberal standard), my general viewpoint is the protesters by and large are not anti-Semitic. Instead, as Salmon Rushdie stated, “I feel that there’s not a lot of deep thought happening.” Regardless, that is fine and good as long as protesters protest by the allowed university guidelines. The more they do not, the more likely that some will feel threatened. That brings me to the second point-the 21st century definition of speech and “harm.” The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism classifies one way to be anti-Semitic is “applying double standards to Israel.” This is bad because applying someone’s preconceived notion of a double standard as a definition of hate is dangerous and will be weaponized eventually. We have seen in the last 15 years a rapidly growing tide of people on campuses like Columbia defining some type of forbidden speech as things that make them feel uncomfortable. It is still going on here and elsewhere even outside of the protests. Against this backdrop, I feel that the moral panic about anti-Semitism on campus was inevitable. It is true that by these standards we have seemingly implicitly accepted, the protests pushed the boundaries further than many other examples of speech that was sanctioned. But that doesn’t make calling it anti-Semitism correct, or that cracking down on it in ways Trump wants is good. I feel that in some sad sense everyone has wittingly or unwittingly become hypersensitive in today’s political environment.
Dave,
From early on I was corresponding privately with Scott about the Trump issue, and his stance privately and in blog posts/comments has been consistent. He repeatedly has explained it by a Jurassic Park analogy:
Jewish students : the humans
Antisemitic protestors: the velociraptors
Trump: the T. Rex
In this analogy, the humans were about to be torn apart and killed by velociraptors, they were saved from violent death by the arrival of T. Rex, which killed the velociraptors. The humans then needed to immediately flee the threat of T. Rex. His view of the situation is that Trump is dangerous and very not good, but a necessary evil to deal with the antisemitic protestors. He has consistently expressed to me the opinion that Trump’s campaign against Columbia was a good and necessary thing in that it would deal with the antisemitism here. In his mind the situation at Columbia was so dangerous that he was telling students not to come here.
About Gaza: I don’t think Scott or trustees like Mendelson are in favor of what is unfolding in Gaza right now. They are not like Ben Gvir or Smotrich. What is going on is that they don’t want to think about what is being done to the Palestinians, in Gaza or the West Bank, because looking this in the face would be too painful and shatter the world-view they have built up for themselves. In addition, they see protests about Gaza as a threat to the Israeli state. This is leading them to do something evil: unjustly accuse critics of Israeli actions of being antisemites, trying to destroy them and being willing to collaborate with Trump to do so.
I’m saying this is what is happening because I’ve just had the unfortunate experience of putting it to the test. I had carefully avoided discussing Gaza, trying to stick to the Trump problem. There were good reasons for doing this, but also cowardice was a factor: it was pretty obvious that if you publicly criticized Israeli actions you were going to find yourself attacked as an antisemite. Finally I realized there was no way to understand and discuss what has been going on here without confronting this (and recent Israeli actions made the moral case to do so overwhelming). So, because of what I wrote about Gaza I’m publicly described as “an antisemitic piece of shit” by a prominent academic who I thought of as a friend. I’m really not happy with this.
This kind of intimidation is a big part of the story of what has happened and is happening here. In the NY Mag article, the situation among the trustees is described by
“it was difficult for trustees to take the position that antisemitism was a small or medium-size problem — even if they honestly saw it that way”
I’m sure many of the trustees are well-aware that the antisemitism accusations are way overblown by those who want to defend Israel. But they’re also well aware that if they say this they will immediately make powerful enemies and face accusations of antisemitism themselves. About how this is affecting board discussions and negotiations with the Trump administration one can only speculate. But given what has happened up until now and the details revealed in the article I think Mendelson should immediately resign or be removed from the board.
Yes-well the idea that the protesters are a velociraptor-type threat to Jews or even Israel is rather out there. I really do see a problem with the fact that in the 21st century everyone more or less seems to cling more to their identities than in any other time in recent history. This is unhealthy obviously-we have seen the rise of this on the left and on the right in all sorts of bad ways. Scott would likely say that clinging to his Israel-connected identity is absolutely necessary for survival. But we know from some of the only reliable psychological research out there (replicated many times) that when confronted with arguments that challenge your core identity, people retreat and harden their identities. This is one reason we are living in the dumbest time I can recall and a big why politics all over the world are broken. It is interesting that the Jews that I know who are most outspoken about the protests being 100% anti-Semitic to the core are Israeli or closely connected to Israel. For example, a couple I know who live in Toronto-wife is Israeli husband is Jewish from Argentina. She wants to go back to Israel because Toronto is “anti-Semitic.” He doesn’t see it that way. I doubt those like him are just oblivious to anti-Semitism. I just think the correlation between these sensitivities and identity are high and this isn’t just with respect to the Israel-Palestine issue.
Of course, any attempt to remove Mendelson from the board will immediately be denounced as antisemitic. It’s a Catch-22.
I’ve said my piece and it’s become obvious that the gulf is unbridgeable. But I do need to say one more thing:
It’s utterly false that I broke off my friendship with Peter because he dared to express concern for the plight of innocents in Gaza (oddly, after months of loudly insisting that this wasn’t his fight and to keep it out of his comment section). As far as I’m concerned, Peter could worry about innocents in Gaza 10,000x as much as he has, be way farther left than he is, and still be my friend.
No, I’ve broken off friendship because Peter refused to acknowledge the fear of being murdered for being Jewish as based—massively, overwhelmingly—on actual historical experience as well as on current events. That’s the only thing I asked of him, over and over, yet it was too much. Indeed, not only did he refuse, he called me vicious names and obscenities every time I asked—my politeness held out way longer than his did!
Peter persisted in dismissing the fear of those all over the world who cheered October 7 and looked forward to its repetition (as their predecessors did the Holocaust) as pure, 100% delusion and psychosis—until he suddenly decided that it was even worse than that, a cynical ruse to justify killing innocents in Gaza. When all the while, if he’d merely acknowledged the legitimacy of Jewish survival fear, he could’ve gone on to argue that fighting Hamas was the wrong approach, or whatever, and any disagreements between us would’ve remained perfectly civil.
It’s only Peter’s contemptuous dismissal of Jewish experience that revealed him as, not merely wrong, but worse than wrong, worse than “not even wrong”—a small, bitter person unworthy of further time or attention from me.
Scott,
If it’s any help, I’ll readily acknowledge that the history of the Jewish people gives them good reason for fear and good reason for the establishment of the state of Israel as a Jewish state (liberal Zionism seems perfectly sensible to me).
These fears though have been relentlessly exploited by bad actors to get good people to do evil things. People like Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben Gvir have used these fears to pursue an appalling campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank. They are leading Israel to a disastrous future as a pariah state, devoting the rest of its history to explaining why it was really the victim when it destroyed the homes of another people and drove them away with murder and famine. You should be fearful about this, not about some students who last year spent a couple weeks in tents to protest what is happening in Gaza.
You’re being used by these evil people in Israel and by the evil movement that has come to power in the US through the cult of Trump, which is now laying waste to democracy and trying to implement dictatorship. Their fundamental tactic is to use people’s fears to get them to believe lies. You believe a pack of lies (for instance that student protesters at Columbia are antisemites who want to kill your family) that you’ve been sold by those exploiting your fears.
I don’t think I’m wrong to have been repeatedly telling you that you are delusional, fanatic and should seek mental health help. I should though have been more aware of and sensitive to the sources of your affliction. Sorry to be harsh, but you’re way too smart for this.
Btw I did finish the artical on Columbia in New York linked here. Quite good. A few minor inaccuracies but just quibbles. By the accounting of the government Columbia has the third lowest endowment per student in the Ivies, not second. Brown and Cornell are lower. This actually “helps” Columbia with a 7% tax as opposed to a 21% one that say Amherst would feel. It is also stated that the person who outed Armstrong was from the “underfunded arts.” The mistake made is due to the fact that it occurred in an A and S meeting but could well have been a scientist on the main campus. I’ve seen that mistake touted ironically on X but it is wrong.
Peter, if you say that
(1) the Jewish fear of survival is perfectly understandable and legitimate, but
(2) the October 7 massacre, and the cheering crowds in Gaza as the raped and brutalized hostages were brought back, and the rallies all over the world celebrating all this on October 8, and Hamas’s promise to repeat it over and over until all Israelis were dead, should not have been enough to activate the fear—if any of it did, you’re 100% delusional, and in need of psychiatric help, or maybe being manipulated by cackling fascists —
if you say both things, then the part that remains very unclear to me is what should be enough, in your view, to activate the fear. Maybe you can Gentile-splain it to me!
Scott,
I’m just a Gentile, but I’d assume that many different events could reasonably “activate the fear”, from missiles landing near Tel Aviv, to worshippers at a local synagogue being gunned down, to October 7. You make this sound though as if something activating this fear flips a switch in your brain turning off all morality and common sense. All of a sudden you’re believing crazy things about Columbia students, collaborating with a Fascist dictator, justifying destroying people’s homes and the murder of civilians, etc. etc. You don’t honestly think that other people should react to this happening to you as excusing this sort of behavior?
Scott,
I don’t speak for Peter, but personally, I don’t blame you at all for being afraid. These are scary times, and it’s perfectly understandable that pro-Palestinian protesters would activate some of these fears.
I DO blame you for using that fear to try and restrict their freedom of expression, and for letting that fear push you towards cooperation with a fascist government. A better response would have been to simply denounce the protesters using your own speech.
When you or your family face an actual, specific, imminent threat from these protesters, then by all means you should panic and get the government involved. Otherwise, well, sometimes the world is just a scary place and we have to deal with it.
AJewishGuy: In what way, exactly, have I “cooperated with fascism”? I’ve denounced MAGA consistently on my blog for a decade, and have never worked with them or consulted with them or advised them, and never will. Wanting universities to enforce the rules on their books the way antidiscrimination law would have them do for any other minority — e.g., calls for Jewish genocide are OK only in situations where calls for Black or Muslim genocide would also have been OK — that’s something I’m happy to defend on the merits, and that I defended equally during the Biden administration. And when it looked like an administration I hated had taken up that cause—well, I’m allowed to hope that a great evil that I opposed might produce a tiny good as a byproduct, without thereby becoming morally responsible for the evil. And as soon as it became clear that the administration would not be appeased by reasonable actions on antisemitism, and would use nothing even vaguely approaching due process in going after foreign students—then I flipped, even at the cost of joining forces with people who hated me, and said that universities and civil society needed to fight this.
Scott-
I agree with you that echoing the rhetoric of Hamas is a bad. But personally as a Jew who knows quite a bit about the history of the treatment of Jews, it doesn’t make me put protesters who do this close to the level of Hamas, just like I don’t equate the protesters at Columbia in 1968 who spouted Maoist rhetoric with Mao. Tragically some of those protesters 57 years ago did go on to do bad things-mostly to themselves. Maybe my feelings stem from a lack of connection to Israel, but I also think it stems from actually being here. Did I feel frustrated with the protests here? I did, but not from fear. It was more from the double standards related to speech, which I saw as hypocritical (I think it all should be allowed excepting the next point), as well as the tactics of the protesters which I felt were detrimental to all (including themselves). I would have been completely fine with them saying the very same things if their protests didn’t so purposely violate university guidelines for allowed behavior with respect to things like building take overs and class disruptions. That’s just me and I don’t want to lecture you about your feelings, and I don’t think your feelings in are crazy.
Not that it matters but I wanted to describe something that happened to me yesterday. I was leaving campus when I walked by Peter’s building. Outside there were 4 Keffiyeh-clad graduates taking pictures in cap and gown. Out walks a colleague of Peter’s from the building with his kippah on, slowly chatting with another colleague and walks through the group slowly to get to the path leading out of campus. He and his colleague just kept walking and chatting, and none of the students batted an eye. This of course doesn’t say anything about glorifying Hamas, but it does speak to what most of us have experienced here, especially this year.
Peter, “I feel reasonable fear ergo murdering civilians is great” would indeed be a pretty stupid argument, so good thing I’m not making it!
On the other hand, if
(1) fear of Hamas and its allies murdering all Israelis is indeed reasonable and justified, then
(2) presumably it’s actually true, not some figment of my paranoid fantasies, that Hamas and its allies really do want to murder all Israelis and will actually do so if not stopped, whence
(3) the total surrender and defeat of Hamas is, at any rate, a morally defensible and very far from insane military objective, and
(4) even the most morally justified war in history (say, the Allied WWII effort) is sadly liable to produce many civilian casualties, and
(5) this is even more true if the enemy, almost unprecedentedly in the history of warfare, is trying to maximize its own civilian death count, because its whole explicit strategy is one of mobilizing global outrage against the Jews.
Dave: I’m glad that the students in keffiyehs let the kippah-wearing professor walk by without either beating the other up, not that that’s a very high bar! The many Jewish undergrads at Columbia who tried to join student clubs that became “no Zionists allowed” (“and if you’re Jewish, we’ll interrogate you about it”) seem not to have had such a positive experience. Indeed, their experience was eerily reminiscent of that of the Jews of the Soviet Union, which you agree was bad?
And regarding the students who marched around campus in 1968 praising Mao: either they repented later, or if they didn’t repent, then I’d say it’s totally, 100% fair game to ask them to answer for the 65 million innocents who Mao murdered or starved to death.
Scott-of course some of that indeed happen, and it is not good. My point about the interaction yesterday was not to whitewash any of this-it is merely to point out that what I described is the typical environment one finds here. And while I don’t think being shamed out of your dance club is good, should be condoned, allowed or that it creates the kind of environment one wants at a university-it also isn’t Hamas-level stuff. Far from it. It absolutely is completely fair game to ask and argue with Maoists about those who Mao killed or starved. But what does answer here mean other than that?
All,
Despite my attempts to keep this under control by deleting most of the incoming comments (most of which wanted to explain to Scott, at length, why he is an idiot), this has turned into the “argue with Scott” blog. He is indefatigable in repeating the same nonsense about what he thinks is happening at Columbia and sturdy in his conviction that what Israel is doing is fine, no matter how many Palestinian corpses pile up. I’m tired of this. It’s both morally appalling and boring. If he wants to continue the show it will have to be at his own blog, I’m shutting off comments for now on this one.
BTW Scott-I should add that the club shaming incidents are unfortunately part of a social phenomena you know well-the censorious exclusion that is more and more common among young people based on belief sorting. The same thing would happen if someone was a Trump voter, for example, which I think would be harder to detect than being Jewish and asked to profess your anti-Zionist beliefs for entrance. But be damned sure if you walked into your dance club practice with a Make America Great Again hat you’d be cancelled. I think these things are very bad, but I hardly think of this as the same universe as having genocidal beliefs. And while it creates a very bad environment for some students, it is hard to police. Do you think a Jew who showed up at Columbia’s Hillel would be welcomed if they wore a Keffiyeh to Shabbat dinner? I mean this happened at USC and people were incensed…